I fully apologize for going into Time Warp Mode on you this week, readers, but it’s kind of necessary in my world. Come tomorrow, I’m hitting the road and returning to the Central Texas area for the first time in years…many, many years. I’ll spend time at a track I haven’t seen since maybe 2004. I’ll see roads I know I haven’t seen since 2005. I might even try to slink my way onto Fort Hood for a real kick of nostalgia…I don’t know how successful I’ll be at that, but it can’t hurt to try. My days in Texas were wild and feral, almost more so than my final high-school years where I lived without supervision or rules. We were overgrown kids with money, jobs, and time on our hands. We worked hard, we played hard, and we partied hard. They are days that I miss, good times all around. We’re talking fully-on from the moment we woke up and made our way to the grassy field to go run some stupid amount of miles around a hilly area to the weekend nights that often ran to thoughtful discussions in the early hours of the morning while hammered out of our skulls.
And if you want a tie-in for cars, we had ’em. There were off-roading trips in my Blazer, speed sprints to Austin in one guy’s Eldorado, working on a Karmann Ghia and a Civic, highway pulls with any idiot who would try, and donuts at some unholy hour of the morning in an intersection far from humanity, soaked in rain. We ran on adrenaline and cheap food, natural energy and the concern that in our line of work, that we might not see our thirties. I’m looking forward to going back, and to get into the right mindset, why not bring up a classic Papa Roach song that has the band ripping around in a Mustang, a Corvette and a couple of Pontiacs? Considering some of the stuff I did back then on the backroads near Copperas Cove, it just seems…right.
Yawn….